Why Men Still Pay For First Dates, and More

“The company’s survey indicates that, in the early stages of courting, the pressure to pay falls primarily on men, but this imbalance hardly dissolves as the relationship progresses. Fifty-six percent of men foot the bill in full once they’re in an established relationship, and, even further down the line, 36 percent of men pay all of household bills, versus 14 percent of women. There’s not much in the way of historical data on the question of who pays for dates, but the findings of a 1985 poll suggest that very little has changed in the past 30 years.”

“The decisive moment for Cook came at the end of his first year as CEO when he fired Scott Forstall, one of Jobs’s most trusted lieutenants. Forstall had led software development for the iPad and iPhone; he was also divisive and responsible for the poorly received Apple Maps and Siri voice recognition service. There was an audible gasp in Apple’s offices when the dismissal was announced, say people who were there. Cook immediately convened meetings with senior managers to explain how the new structure was going to work. Jonathan Ive, Apple’s head of design, was given control over the look and feel of iOS while development of the mobile operating system was consolidated with Mac software under Craig Federighi, the senior vice president for software engineering.”

“Amazingly, there was a time when the NFL was perceived to be so staid and honorable that NBC Universal and WWE magnate Vince McMahon paired up to invest some $100 million in a rowdy, “bad-boy” rival. The XFL was the game of football drenched in a healthy heaping of pro-wrestling’s attitude and, naturally, it didn’t make it beyond its inaugural 2001 season.”

“When the agony of missing the shot trumps the joy of the experience worth shooting, the adventure athlete (climber, surfer, extreme skier) reveals himself to be something else: a filmmaker, a brand, a vessel for the creation of content. He used to just do the thing—plan the killer trip or trick and then complete it, with panache. Maybe a photographer or film crew tagged along, and afterward there’d be a slide show at community centers and high-school gyms, or an article in a magazine. Now the purpose of the trip or trick is the record of it. Life is footage.”

“It was Dec. 31, 2006. I was 33. I did not yet know this, but a clot had traveled from my aorta into my brain, and made its way to my left thalamus. As a result, my left brain, the expert at numbers and language and logic and reasoning, a part of it suffocated and died. My right brain, the specialist with regard to color, music, creativity, intuition, and emotions, therefore could not talk to my left brain. Numbers became squiggles, colors lost their names, food lost flavor, music had no melody.”

“The internship—a spell of CV-burnishing work experience—is now ubiquitous across America and beyond. This year young Americans will complete perhaps 1m such placements; Google alone recruited 3,000 interns this summer, promising them the chance to “do cool things that matter”. Brussels and Luxembourg are the summer homes of 1,400 stagiaires, or embryonic Eurocrats, doing five-month spells at the European Commission. The “Big Four” audit companies—Deloitte, Ernst & Young, KPMG and PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC)—will employ more than 30,000 interns this year. Bank of China runs an eight-week programme (“full of contentment, yet indescribable”, according to an intern quoted on its website); Alibaba, a Chinese online-retailing behemoth, has a global scheme. Infosys, an Indian tech giant, brings 150 interns from around the world to Bangalore each year.”